My kid is amazing.-- Updated

My older kid got straight A's today. I am so tickled. Dinner will be baked fish, fresh wraps, lettuce, onion, tzatziki sauce, and falafel. And Daddy is picking something up from the store for dessert. YAY! Recipes and such later!

Okay, last night in addition to my veggie chili I also rolled some fish fillets in flour, egg and seasoned bread crumbs and baked them. Then I put them in the fridge to use tonight. Other things on the menu, making falafel from a mix (just add water!) and homemade flat bread (not unlike tortillas) and some delicious tzatziki sauce.

I took about 1 1/2 C of plain yogurt (could also be Greek yogurt) and seasoned it with chopped garlic, House Blend seasoning, fresh chopped dill and then added 1 shredded cucumber. To keep your tzatziki from getting too watery, take the shredded cucumber and place it inside many thicknesses of paper towels and squeeze it out over a bowl or over the sink. Squeeze and squeeze and squeeze! You could also use a clean dish towel (that you don't mind dyeing green) or some cheesecloth. When it is wrung out you can then add it to the yogurt mixture. Stir together and let sit for a few hours or even overnight.

Then I made the flatbread dough, (I sort of cobbled together some recipes and mixed it with my tortilla recipe) and then I made the falafel mix. Had I to do this meal over again, I would have made the flatbread earlier in the day (or just bought some!) and then made the falafel as the very last thing, while the fish warmed up in the oven. As it was the falafel got a little cold from waiting for me to finish the flatbread. I had the hubby shred some lettuce and we called it a meal. In a few minutes I am headed into the kitchen to share in the world's tiniest chocolate cake with white icing and pink buttercream roses to celebrate our kid's awesome All A achievement.

Fish Fridays

So I have some frozen fish I am going to use tonight in my Fish Friday dinner. I have to say I am always a little bit intimidated by fish, it seems so much less forgiving than say, beef or even vegetables. It cooks really fast, it can be easily overwhelmed by other flavors if it is a mild fish and it can be overpowering of simple side dishes if it is really "fishy". Other than the heart healthy benefits, I think that is why salmon really took off. It is a fishy-fish, but it comes in those comforting and easy to use "steaks" and since it has so much good oil in it, it stays moist under much less skillful handling than does say, yellow tail snapper.

So tonight, just for the halibut, (ha!) I am going to approach this from an ethnic foods angle. I am going to do some Greek Fish applications, which from my cursory research seem to depend on salt, lemon, tomatoes and olive oil. And than sounds pretty good to me! I can make some flat bread (been meaning to all week) and a nice salad, maybe some hummus too. I think that by looking at it as an experiment with a cuisine that I love to eat, but haven't actually MADE a lot of I can sort of take the "fish fear" out of it and have more fun with dinner as a whole.